For the typical neighbourhood store on Ordrio, three in four online orders are paid in cash at the door. Orders cluster in the evening, Saturday is the busiest day, and a typical basket is about Rs 312. We know this because we counted: this article uses 107,127 orders that customers placed themselves in the 12 months to 6 October 2026, across 97 stores in India.
Most writing about Indian online selling quotes national averages from big platforms. A store with a few hundred orders a month is a different business, and its owner needs to know what stores like theirs see. This is a first, small picture from our own data, with its limits stated.
How to read this article
- Our data means orders in Ordrio's production database, counted by us. The method is below.
- Our view is marked as such. It is an argument from the numbers, not a finding.
- What we do not know is listed at the end.
Method
- Source. Ordrio's live store database, read-only, aggregate counts only. No store, customer or order is identified here.
- Which orders. Regular orders that customers placed themselves, in stores in India, created in the 12 months to 6 October 2026. We left out orders entered by store staff, point-of-sale and imported orders, and subscription orders. We excluded stores whose names contain "test", "demo", "sample" or "qa". That is a name filter, so it is not perfect.
- How many. 107,127 orders from 97 stores.
- One store dominates. A single store accounts for more than half of all orders, and the top five stores for 86 per cent. A total across all orders would mostly describe that one store. So for payment and basket figures we use the 25 stores with at least 100 orders and report medians across stores. For timing, we show the pattern with the largest store removed: 45,502 orders from 96 stores. All times are India Standard Time.
1. Cash on delivery: three in four orders, and a wide spread
Across the 25 stores with at least 100 orders, the median store takes 75 per cent of its orders as cash on delivery. A quarter of stores take 52 per cent or less, and a quarter take 99 per cent or more. Eight stores take at least 90 per cent as cash, and six take half or less.
With the largest store removed, cash on delivery is 74.9 per cent of the remaining orders, so the median is not an artefact of one store.
Our view: a store that plans around online payment alone is planning for a minority of its customers. Cash is the default way these customers pay, and the spread between stores shows it is also a choice each store can influence, for instance by how it presents payment options at checkout. We have not tested which changes move the number, so we do not claim any.
2. The evening is the busiest part of the day
With the largest store removed, orders by hour look like this.
| Time (IST) | Share of orders |
|---|---|
| Before 7:00 | about 2.5 per cent |
| 7:00 to 9:59 | about 10 per cent |
| 10:00 to 16:59 | about 46 per cent, a flat plateau of roughly 6 to 7 per cent an hour |
| 17:00 to 19:59 | about 25 per cent |
| 20:00 to 20:59 | about 7 per cent |
| 21:00 to 23:59 | about 10 per cent |
18:00 to 19:00 is the single busiest hour, at about 9 per cent of orders. The median store has 24 per cent of its orders between 17:00 and 19:59, so this is not one store's habit.
Our view: if you can only watch your orders closely for a few hours, 17:00 to 21:00 is where the most orders land. About one order in eight (12 per cent) arrives before 7:00 or after 21:00, and the median store sees 11 per cent. Those customers wait for a confirmation until the next morning unless a store sets its opening hours and cut-off times deliberately, so decide what a late order should be told.
3. Saturday is the busiest day
Across the 96 stores, Saturday carries 7,301 orders. A typical Tuesday to Thursday carries about 6,240, so Saturday is about 17 per cent higher. Friday is slightly above midweek at 6,558. Sunday, at 6,221, is not busier than a midweek day for these stores.
Our view: stock and delivery capacity for Friday evening and Saturday matter more than the weekend as a whole. Do not assume Sunday is a second peak.
4. A typical order is about Rs 312
Taking each store's median delivered order value and then the median of those, the typical basket is about Rs 312. We use medians because a few stores with large baskets would pull an average well above what most stores see. Averaging all orders would also mostly describe the largest store.
What this means for a store owner
These are points from our own reading of the numbers:
- Plan for cash. Decide how and when you reconcile cash collected by riders, because most of your orders will need it.
- Cover 17:00 to 21:00 first, then the daytime plateau. Those four hours contain about a third of your orders.
- Prepare for Saturday from Friday afternoon.
- Decide what happens to an order at 22:00. About one in eight arrives at hours when the shop is quiet.
- Count your own numbers for two weeks. Group orders by payment type, hour and weekday, and compare them with the ranges here. Your store may sit at either end.
If you run on Ordrio, Nadi shows your orders and payment mix, and Kadal your counter sales, so you can check these ranges against your own. Sign up for free or book a demo.
What we do not know
- Whether stores on Ordrio are typical of Indian neighbourhood stores. They chose a platform, and most orders come from a small number of stores.
- How cash on delivery changes by product category, city or order size. We have not split it that way, and the stores that would fill each cell are too few.
- Why a store takes more cash than another. We have not tested any cause.
- Anything about stores outside India, which are too few to report.
- How the numbers will move over the next 12 months.
We will repeat this count and publish how it changes.